Shadows Developer Blog

There’s an altar near 100,90,0 if you find yourself needing one. Only a few things left to do:

Corpse stuff is finished, very happy with how well it went. Killing someone will now leave a properly named corpse with their inventory in it. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Also fixed some minor ghost buglets and am now moving on to finishing off ghost stuff — right now they can’t move, “talk”, or do anything other than sit around.

– Silas

.. finally implemented dynamic string tokens and proper client encoding/decoding. Basically, for dynamic strings that live server-side, instead of sending the whole string anytime it was needed I am sending a 4-byte token. If the client doesn’t recognize that token, it asks the server for it. So a string like “Admin Mog”, which actually took 12 to send, now takes 4. This saves me a ton of bandwidth.

I also fixed client string encoding, from crude “chop everything off but the last 8 bits” to “encode to US-ASCII” (because that’s the only charset serva speaks, and that’s not changing in the forseeable future). Unrecognized characters will now show up as “?” instead of random garbage. If at some point the international Shadows community demands UTF-8, well, maybe. It’s been tested, albeit not very thoroughly.

Back to death… would you believe I did the above because dead bodies are going to be named “X’s corpse” and it motivated me to finally tackle reasonable string handling?

– Silas

Kind of crazy how I can look at an algorithm I sweated blood over several years ago, and see immediately that it’s got not only one bad flaw, but several. So, I’ve fixed up water flow again, and am continuing work on boring guts like string tokens (yes, you’ll finally see player names!) and one way containers, with an eye on finishing death & resurrection.

– Silas

.. Booga the bloody elven punching bag was beat to death on Hell today. He took it well, immediately pointing out several bugs relating to client screen updating, ghost visibility to admins, and a laundry list of little niggling things that are probably going to take a couple weeks to clean up.

Until some more coding is done, Death is kind of, well, unrecoverable. So this won’t be going live for some time, but it’s a big milestone that required a lot of other systems to be in place.

– Silas

So, as part of the overall movement semantics I’ve added the concept of ’shoving’. Even though the engine can handle multiple players per tile, it would have been a real interface headache. So, a non-violent alternative to getting someone out of your way is simple: just shove your way through them. In order to avoid people being shoved around willy-nilly, the chance to succesfully shove someone is based mostly on how long you’ve been sitting around, and as soon as you are successfully shoved the counter resets. I think this will go a long way to prevent griefers sitting around blocking shop/dungeon entrances and the like, but it’s not terribly abusable unless you go afk in a public place for a long time (you can be shoved around 2 tiles per minute, with the current formulas).

Right now the only feedback when you shove someone is a small grunt, but I’m planning a message eventually once I work out name tokens for people who are playing without sound (thanks Andrex!).

The new code is live on Eden as of this post.

– Silas

Lots of design work going on behind the scenes, ironing out the nitty gritty of things like death, drops, player/ghost stacking, and rezzing. I’m about ready to start back into some serious coding, though neither life nor work has been cooperating much lately — the “busy” that started last summer hasn’t really let up yet.

On a somewhat related note, I quit WoW in December. Last year I went from a casual raider (yes, there is such a thing, and I was part of a casual raiding guild) to an officer, to a secondary raid leader, to one of the main raid organizers and leaders. And yes, I was having an absolute blast. I was also getting close to a cliff that wouldn’t have been any fun to fall off and would probably have been a very long way down, so I said my goodbyes and deleted everything, much to the chagrin of those who would have given their eyeteeth for my raiding toon. Do I miss it? Nope. Not even a twinge. It was a good time and I’m glad I went out on a high note.

– Silas

Way too many fixpack releases back to back this summer. It’s over now, unless the testing teams find something hideously wrong with the GM candidate. Bleah. I need a vacation.

– Silas

.. I’m on vacation out of province so all the computers are shut down.

– Silas

Working on Death, but it’s thrown quite a lot of complications at me. Containers need to get a little bigger to hold the contents of inventory and equipment, player ghosts need to be able to walk through other players, multiple ghosts and dead bodies need to be able to co-exist at any given spot, and require some UI tweaking to be selectable.

All in good time. Work’s been kind of crazy too lately, which always puts a damper on my Shadow coding.

– Silas